Saturday, August 13, 2011

UFOs and the Death of God [Redux]

Reading through Wonders in the Sky by Jacques Vallee and Chris Aubeck [Penguin Group, NY, 2009] one is struck how most of those sightings from antiquity through the Middle Ages up to the beginning of the 20th Century have a direct or tangential connection to persons or enterprises that have a religious patina.

As aficionados of UFOs know, modern sightings, mainly from 1945 on, are secular in nature; that is, UFOs or flying saucers were not attendant or dependent upon a religious overlay.

Why is that?

I conjecture that UFOs had an umbilical connection to those events and people who believed in God and practiced the Faith, no matter if what the denomination or premise what was: Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Pagan, Mayan, Christianity, et alii.

But after the Death of God – and I believe that God died, not metaphorically as Nietzsche proposed, but actually – UFOs became attracted to humankind as a symbolic phenomenon, with meaning that has yet to be discerned.

Carl Jung’s magnificently clear rumination on the nature and reality of God in Answer to Job outlines how God, in a fit of divine despair, about how humans had been treated by Him and the vicissitudes of His creation, became incarnate, as Jesus Christ to atone for His (God’s) misbehavior, and ultimately die as a personal -- shall I say suicidal? – retribution to assuage the divine guilt.

However, that atonement, by partial Deicide, was short lived, and God’s aloof, distant, or hidden nature [See Richard Friedman’s The Hidden Face of God] brought about, in modern times, one of the most horrific episodes against humanity, and a chosen element of that humanity: The Holocaust.

In that human catastrophe and its aftermath, God died -- He either did Himself in (a total act of Decide) or died of a divine heartbreak; either way, God Himself – not his surrogate (Son) but God Himself died in h mid-1940s A.D.

Thus UFOs, whatever they were or are were transmogrified by the Divine denouement, but destined to intervene in human affairs by an eternal mandate of God, had to continue the “mission” and secular sightings became the norm, and the religious connection was set aside or lost from that point on.

This doesn’t explain, admittedly, what UFOs are, their essential makeup, nor their purpose. But it may explain by Vallee’s and Aubeck’s litany of ancient UFO sightings have been replaced by a litany of secular UFO sightings.